462 Notes of the Month on [OCT. 



not do this. If the state were to give ten thousand pounds a year to its 

 man of merit, there are ten thousand grocers and cheesemongers who 

 make ten thousand pounds a year ; give him a hundred thousand, a 

 rogue of a stockbroker, or a grinding government-contractor, clears the 

 sum in a week or a day. The point is, to give a reward which shall be 

 inaccessible to the lower and more commonplace pursuits of life, and 

 that reward can alone be in some mark of honour proceeding from the 

 throne ; an order, higher still, a title ; and higher still, a title which 

 confers nobility not merely on its first receiver, but on all his descend- 

 ants. A title has the peculiar advantages of being congenial to the 

 spirit of honour, which is the spirit of all that is truly eminent in public 

 life, and which it should be the first object of the state to excite and 

 sustain. Next it is the least costly of all rewards to the state, a matter 

 of no trivial importance ; and next, it is exclusive and unattainable but 

 by the will of the state or sovereign, which is not the case with 

 money. 



At the same time we allow that titles may grow too common, even 

 here ; that a title without wealth to support its rank is an abuse, and 

 that a poor peerage must be at once an object of public scorn and of 

 political danger. A pensioned pauper, though a peer, must be a slave, 

 and in the present strides to grasp at the whole power of the country, 

 patriotic men cannot watch too carefully the composition of the House 

 of Lords. The project of creating peers for life only, has been proposed, 

 but the obvious result would be to crowd the House with creatures of 

 the minister on any emergency, as he would feel that in a few years his 

 creation would be got rid of by death, and the peerage no more crowded 

 than before. It would also give him a formidable patronage ; for every 

 death would allow him, at least, the opportunity of filling up the 

 vacancy, if he so pleased, and he would have candidates in multitudes 

 for the honour. It would also make two classes of peers, and would tend 

 to violent schisms in the House. But the true remedy for the disease is 

 a qualification. As in the Commons no man can sit for a borough, who 

 has not 300/. a year landed property, or for a county who has not 

 600/. ; so, let no peer hereafter created be capable of sitting in parliament 

 without a freehold estate of 20,000/. a year, the very least sum on which 

 a peer of England can sustain his rank with fitting dignity ; and let no 

 peer be created who cannot settle on his son, and the descendants of that 

 son, his 20,000/. a year. This would give the peerage a dignity in the 

 public eye, which will never be given to the poor nobleman. It will 

 give them a power of preserving their independence of corruption, and 

 place-mongering for themselves and their sons, without which a House 

 of Peers must become a public peril. Let our next Parliament bestir 

 itself in the matter, and make us at last proud of our Legislature ! 



Among the overflow of Family Libraries, &c., we have been struck 

 peculiarly with one set of volumes, which contains more knowledge 

 of life, more interesting anecdote, and more actual history, than three- 

 fourths of the heap. We speak of the collection of " Auto-Biographies/' 

 now amounting to about thirty very convenient boudoir volumes, pub- 

 lished by Whittaker. It proposes to contain every memoir to be found in 

 the modern languages, in which the writer has been his own historian. 

 We thus have Gibbon, Kotzebue, Voltaire, Hume, Gilford, Creichton, 

 Prince Eugene, Ferguson, Whitefield, and a whole host of others ; 



